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Everything but the thought counts in the endearingly cheesy Love Hurts

The Valentine's Day-themed romp has its heart in the wrong place, but it makes up for it with lots of silliness.

Everything but the thought counts in the endearingly cheesy Love Hurts
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Those with long-term romantic partners have learned that, beyond the cheesy gifts of bears and candies and flowers, all a successful Valentine’s Day needs is thoughtfulness. They also learn that the bears and candies and flowers don’t hurt. Love Hurts, an action movie as committed to its holiday bit as a late-career Garry Marshall film, approaches its theme with a focus on the latter. There’s not a lot of thought here, but it’s the little things—the intensity with which the film wholeheartedly buys into its festive setting and taps into an almost Hallmark-level of silliness through that devotion—that endear you to Love Hurts beyond its tacky genre obligations.

From the producers of David Leitch-adjacent action movies like Nobody, Love Hurts presents another harmless suburbanite—this time Ke Huy Quan as the cloyingly cutesy realtor Marvin—who must give into the universe’s magnetic call to kick some ass. Quan does a broader version of the “harmless happy-go-lucky to pose-striking hero” routine from Everything Everywhere All At Once, discarding his plastered-on salesman’s smile when semi-threatening “Valentine’s Day cards” from his old acquaintance Rose (Ariana DeBose) start turning up. Oh, and when a guy named The Raven (Mustafa Shakir) crashes his office party and puts a knife through his hand.

Despite this party-crashing (and how thoroughly Shakir steals the show as an emo poet-assassin who dashes around in a Matrix trenchcoat), Love Hurts maintains enough work-life balance that—aside from the film’s best scene, inside a home Marvin is in the process of selling—the professional and personal rarely collide. Part of this is due to the film seeming to take place over just two days (despite this, everyone continues their Valentine’s shtick throughout the film; maybe it was on a weekend that year?), so there’s not quite enough time to develop stakes beyond “bad guys are here now, fight them.”

And for the most part, that does the job. The plot is as simple yet opaque as the message on a badly stamped candy heart: Marvin’s crime lord brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) wants Rose dead, while ex-enforcer Marvin is responsible for her still drawing breath. From there, cash grabs and backstabs string together a series of fights and getaways. It’s a tangled web of underlings, bad voiceover, and emotional motivations that are, at best, icky. (DeBose doesn’t just choke on the scenery as Rose, but serves as a woefully miscast love interest for Quan.) But more enjoyably, the narrative is mostly an excuse to string together charming genre ephemera, like bickering henchmen and combat that collides with the cheery artifice of realty.

Though the screenwriter team—which includes a veteran of Wu’s Into The Badlands, among others—has a hard time making its tones stick together, Love Hurts works when it leans into its eccentricities. Sean Astin turns up in a big cowboy hat. Rhys Darby wears terrible prosthetic teeth. Wu can’t stop chugging boba. 

Marshawn Lynch continues his streak of winning comic performances, here operating as part of a two-member goon squad with the similarly funny André Eriksen. Aside from the visceral pleasures of Lynch tackling someone through a wall, their action scenes take their time to pause for comic beats and don’t shy away from someone yelping, cartoon-like, in pain. When the pair arm themselves with giant novelty silverware from a Hobby Lobby-core kitchen wall, then high five, Love Hurts is firing on every silly cylinder. 

Debut feature director JoJo Eusebio, who worked as a coordinator for the John Wick series and several superhero movies after decades in stunts, stages exciting and entertaining fights, especially when intertwining the action with the comedy. Creative weapons and moments—including one where Marvin is stuffed in a fridge, then the whole fridge is tossed across the room—give the standard martial artistry a sugar rush, and Eusebio always has his camera in the right place to properly catch the punches and punchlines.

But too often, especially as the film rounds the bend of its 83-minute runtime, Love Hurts reverts to its too-serious brother-against-brother core, becoming a hardbitten and tiringly generic bloodbath. When a decent chunk of this brief film is spent on Marvin’s employee (Lio Tipton) falling for the goth killer she discovered in her boss’ office, and on Marvin energetically protesting that he loves and takes pride in his new life, the earnestness of the film’s big moments sag sadly like a week-old heart balloon. 

Unlike his pathos-driven predecessor John Wick, or Nobody’s watered-down and emasculated version of that killer, Marvin’s immediate return to his violent ways runs headlong into a script that, every once in a while, offers up a speech or a platitude about all the reasons he doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t want to kill! He loves being an award-winning realtor. But he sure does stab a lot of people to death. Perhaps if the thin film had cut one of its various baddies (Cam Gigandet’s swaggering nobody comes to mind), it would have had room to reconcile the confusion masquerading as its central character. But Love Hurts proves that honest emotions aren’t everything; sometimes you can just buy yourself enough goodwill to get by with last-minute junk.

Director: JoJo Eusebio
Writer: Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, Luke Passmore
Starring: Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Daniel Wu, Sean Astin, Mustafa Shakir, Lio Tipton, Rhys Darby, Marshawn Lynch, André Eriksen
Release Date: February 7, 2025

 
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